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The Sleeping Cardinal
Sherlock Holmes' Fatal Hour
UK 1931
produced by Julius Hagen for Twickenham
directed by Lislie S. Hiscott
starring Arthur Wontner, Ian Fleming (II), Philip Hewland, Jane Welsh, Norman McKinnel, Minnie Rayner, Leslie Perrins, Gordon Begg, William Fazan, Sidney King, Louis Goodrich, Charles Paton
screenplay by Leslie S. Hiscott, H. Fowler Mear, Cyril Twyford, based on the stories The Empty House and The Final Problem by Arthur Conan Doyle, music by John Greenwood
Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Wontner), Moriarty
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Robert Adair (Leslie Perrins) loves to play Bridge for high stakes, and
he never ever loses - which can of course only mean one thing, he cheats.
His sister Kathleen (Jane Welsh) becomes increasingly worried about him,
so she contacts her friend Dr Watson (Ian Fleming) for help, who promises
her to have his friend Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Wontner) talk to Robert ... Sherlock
Holmes investigates a break-in into a bank during which nothing has been
stolen ... or so it seems at least, because Holmes finds clue after clue
that there's more to this than meets the eye, clues that lead him to a
bootmaker (Charles Paton) who doubles as a money forger, and to Robert
Adair, who works for the diplomatic corps and thus could get large amounts
of money through customs easily. But before Holmes can prove anything,
Adair is murdered, and all clues lead to - Holmes' arch-enemy Moriarty,
who has indeed been blackmailing Adair, but at the moment, nobody believes
in Holmes' Moriarty theories, especially since nobody is even convinced of
his existance, and when Holmes starts rambling on about things that seem
to have no connection to the case, that doesn't help ... until Holmes sets
a trap for Moriarty and gets him to make an (unsuccessful) attempt on his
life - upon which the police is able to catch him red-handed, and to
nobody's real surprise Moriarty turns out to be Colonel Henslowe (Norman
McKinnel), a friend of the Adair family. A very weak Sherlock
Holmes-film, not only because or its stagey, even creaky direction, its
total disregard of pacing, its dull limited indoor sets and its mediocre
cast, but also because of the very unmysterious murder mystery the film is
trying to tell: Moriarty's methods are presented to the viewer in almost
plain sight, the Colonel is presented as the only possible suspect, and
sure enough, he is revealed to be the culprit in the end, Holmes'
ramblings which irritate the other characters quite so much make perfect
sense to everyone in the audience, and if in real life Moriarty would
leave even half as much clues as in the film, he wouldn#t even make a good
shoplifter let alone a master criminal. Definitely not worth your time.
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